Parsers add replayability for casual players

[RushRiviera]

It's hard to compromise from a position where you stand only to lose. Anti-parsers have what they want, full stop. There's no reason to take steps in a direction that they quite literally do not want. Especially not when parsers are already widely used and turned a blind eye to by the FFXIV dev team for the only scene that actually needs them.. raiding.

Good point. So, why not add an official parser that is only available during high-end raids? (Savage/Ultimate difficulty)

[Lanadra]

Good point. So, why not add an official parser that is only available during high-end raids? (Savage/Ultimate difficulty)

I'd personally have no issue with it because it would make no difference to my experience. It would at best be a convenience thing ultimately, and knowing that you're no longer using 3rd party software.

I don't even really mind the idea of a 'personal parser' that is game wide either... provided that I can turn it off and that standing policy about harassing people with parser readouts is maintained. Ergo, as long as it doesn't affect or change my own personal experience I don't really mind it. That is not what a lot of people in this thread want though, it's less about 'providing an official tool that's there for you if you want to use it', which would help console players in particular, and more about 'making sure you see at all times just how shit you are'.

And since we got smart alecks aplenty here I will reiterate: I play my jobs competently for the content I partake in. I avoid extreme/savage/ultimate because I am not interested in playing at that level or being proficient enough to do so. Just because I don't want to deal with a parser does not mean it's because of some fear of what I'll see about myself.

[Raelsar]

Good point. So, why not add an official parser that is only available during high-end raids? (Savage/Ultimate difficulty)

To use an old adage:
"Give them an inch, and they'll take a mile."

That's the biggest concern with any sort of official parser. If introduced, even in a supposedly constrained manner as noted above, the demands to allow it into all levels of content would never stop. The issues they create would outweigh the benefits as it spirals out of control... and unfortunately for the pro-parsing crowd, the historical examples lean towards it creating more social problems than it helps players enjoy the game. So yeah, it would have to be shown that player communities handle the addition of parsers well and don't become heavily biased towards a certain aspect of the gameplay as a result before even a limited implementation would be considered.

As for the "personal parser" argument... it kind of falls into the same issue. Even if players can't see the output of other players, it being there means that someone is going to inevitably talk about their own performance; saying "I did X DPS" is going to responded with "You should have been doing X+Y DPS!", leading to all sorts of problems. No matter how constrained you try to make it, the numbers will get out and the issues will never end.

Unfortunately, as history tells us again and again... people tend to do stupid things when handed a tool that has an easy avenue for misuse.
Rules are in place to help keep that under control, and sometimes the best rule for keeping people safe is to forbid the average person from using it.

[RushRiviera]

To use an old adage:
"Give them an inch, and they'll take a mile."

That's the biggest concern with any sort of official parser. If introduced, even in a supposedly constrained manner as noted above, the demands to allow it into all levels of content would never stop. The issues they create would outweigh the benefits as it spirals out of control...

That doesn't really make sense, the demands to allow a parser into all levels of content are already here. That's what this entire thread is about. This thread is 50 pages long so people are obviously already making demands for a parser. Adding one that is only available for savage and ultimate raids literally gives the majority of pro-parser players what they want... So there will only be a small minority left asking for it to be added to all content.

[Shurrikhan]

Unfortunately, as history tells us again and again... people tend to do stupid things when handed a tool that has an easy avenue for misuse.
Rules are in place to help keep that under control, and sometimes the best rule for keeping people safe is to forbid the average person from using it.

History also tells us that what precedes a given notable tool is still a techne of its own, just as capable of setting contexts of interaction. Just because superstition, for instance, lacks the procedures of what we've since boxed in under the labels of "science" doesn't mean it wasn't acted on.

With our without parsers present, you still have a situation where someone there is a disparity between what is (A) required—e.g., by healing, damage, or mitigation checks—or (B) reasonably expectable—given minimum gear and, for one's level, at least basic level of engagement and understanding—and what's happening in a given setting.

Consider, then... what are the current means, without parsers, by which players can (or are likely to) remedy the situation?

They can, of course, work off whatever indicators of others' mistakes they were able to notice during their own attempts to play well, which can be easier said than done as content grows more difficult. They can state what mistakes they've seen, implicatively pointing fingers, point-by-point, until the voice of the group has found its culprit(s), be they people or actions. They can make assumptions based on known/perceived likely underperformance innate to an undertuned job (especially if early in any given expansion), passing blame with little need even for eyeballed evidence.

What, then, does a parser add? What new means does it create?

We will never see everything that occurred in a fight; a parser, however, will account for all of it. (It's not necessarily contextualized, but every point of throughput is accounted for nonetheless.) We will often make overmuch of the particular mistakes we've seen; a parser will not. We will often assume larger performance differences from perceived imbalance than we ought to; a parser makes no assumptions. We may have the wrong idea of what optimized play entails; a parser forms no ideas, only shows the facts of one's performance.

:: The addition of a parser is little more replacing the likes of children bickering over who owes whom how much of a favor instead with a ledger that can, in this case, appropriately quantify each interaction and bring it all to a sum, thus altogether skipping any need to bicker.

[Alxyzntlct]

...We will never see everything that occurred in a fight; a parser, however, will account for all of it. We will often make overmuch of the particular mistakes we've seen; a parser will not. We will often assume larger performance differences from perceived imbalance than we ought to; a parser makes no assumptions. We may have the wrong idea of what optimized play entails; a parser forms no ideas, only shows the facts of one's performance.

:: The addition of a parser is little more replacing the likes of children bickering over who owes whom how much of a favor instead with a ledger that can, in this case, appropriately quantify each interaction and bring it all to a sum, thus altogether skipping any need to bicker.

Um... that's not actually true (that bit I highlighted in bold), at least in my experience. The #1 problem I've had with other people and parsers is the fact that the vast majority of people who use them specifically stop paying attention to a lot of game mechanics and instead focus on the pretty dps numbers. In fact, I've never known any parser to track literally "all of it".

To me, that's the biggest problem with a parser; it doesn't track everything, which leads to some folks focusing on just specific aspects of gameplay rather than all.

Which makes the following statement about the addition of a parser also patently false; so long as any tool doesn't account for everything, then there will be discrepancies in how people perceive and then use such a tool. And it's that perspective difference that folks want to avoid having formally introduced into the game since it leads to unpleasant experiences.

Am I missing something? Is there really some magical parser out there that inherently knows FFXIV gameplay and mechanics and is accurately tracking not only the individual abilities but also denoting context of when and where they all need to be used?

[ZedxKayn]

Um... that's not actually true (that bit I highlighted in bold), at least in my experience. The #1 problem I've had with other people and parsers is the fact that the vast majority of people who use them specifically stop paying attention to a lot of game mechanics and instead focus on the pretty dps numbers. In fact, I've never known any parser to track literally "all of it".

To me, that's the biggest problem with a parser; it doesn't track everything, which leads to some folks focusing on just specific aspects of gameplay rather than all.

Which makes the following statement also patently false; so long as any tool doesn't account for everything, then there will be discrepancies in how people perceive and then use such a tool. And it's that perspective difference that folks want to avoid having formally introduced into the game since it leads to unpleasant experiences.

Am I missing something? Is there really some magical parser out there that inherently knows FFXIV gameplay and mechanics and is accurately tracking not only the individual abilities but also denoting context of when and where they all need to be used?

Such as?
Movement is tracked, enemy casts are tracked, downtime is tracked, fflogs offers pretty accurate replays

[Shurrikhan]

In fact, I've never known any parser to track literally "all of it".

It is objectively counting any and all throughput.

Mistakes will have a cost to, at minimum, one's own throughput, but how much so is still quantifiably measurable. The exact mistake -- e.g., that I flubbed a combo while you misaligned your CDs -- is irrelevant; how much they actually impacted our performance is all that will ultimately matter.

To me, that's the biggest problem with a parser; it doesn't track everything, which leads to some folks focusing on just specific aspects of gameplay rather than all.

Let's pretend for a moment that this wasn't already specifically regarding questions of whose throughput fell short, such as why a group is failing a dps check, or that such a question is somehow not most directly answered through metrics related to throughput.

You seem to be falling under the misconception that parsers can only measure DPS. ACT may call that satisfactory (though it includes more than that as well, just not via its mini display), as it was made only for those who particularly needed DPS metrics (for raids that are ultimately cleared or failed because of DPS), but that's far from from the limit of parsers.

Percent active time, enemy active time against you (a.k.a., kiting percentile), (de)buff uptime, specific (de)buff's uptime, specific (de)buff's uptime against a focus target, avoidable damage taken, number of instances of avoidable damage taken, vulnerability stacks acquired, deaths, raid time spent rezzing you, healer % uptime spent healing your avoidable damage taken, total mitigation, average percent mitigation, average %HP decrease per strike taken, average %HP decrease per strike taken above a set threshold, damage percentiles by source, incoming damage by source, effective healing done, overhealing done, average overhealing percentile, average overhealing cast as portion of total healing casts, damage dealt to specific targets, overkill percentage, and the like are all displayable in real-time through parsers. Heck, a parser can even run live comparisons between someone else's log over time or the time-charted events therein and one's current, allowing one to compare the actions cast and portions and running sums of damage from, say, the world's best ad-hoc build Samurai player in the exact same Savage raid even as you run it. The boundaries of parsers as a concept are far from barebone or basic.

The only relevant things a parser cannot calculate are those which requires mapping, such as whether one's movement was greater than the minimum distance by which they could have dodged a given AoE; granted, an official/integrated parser actually could do that. (There is no need to account for latency, a player's human response times, etc., separately from matters already tracked as average activity delays on non-casters.) So, what exactly is it that real-time data as a concept is so inherently reductive of?

Heck, look at the way WoW uses their logs: in addition to all we see already on fflogs, you can watch in-time replays of every player's and mob's positions, their health, their mana, their special resources, each cast made or aura/buff/debuff applied, pauseable, rewindable, fastforward-able, seekable, bookmarkable. We obviously don't need to go that far, but let's not pretend a parser is inherently some barebone "DPS box" alone.

[Alxyzntlct]

It is objectively counting any and all throughput.

Mistakes will have a cost to, at minimum, one's own throughput, but how much so is still quantifiably measurable. The exact mistake -- e.g., that I flubbed a combo while you misaligned your CDs -- is irrelevant; how much they actually impacted our performance is all that will ultimately matter.


Let's pretend for a moment that this wasn't already specifically regarding questions of whose throughput fell short, such as why a group is failing a dps check, or that such a question is somehow not most directly answered through metrics related to throughput.

You seem to be falling under the misconception that parsers can only measure DPS. ACT may call that satisfactory (though it includes more than that as well, just not via its mini display), as it was made only for those who particularly needed DPS metrics (for raids that are ultimately cleared or failed because of DPS), but that's far from from the limit of parsers.

Percent active time, enemy active time against you (a.k.a., kiting percentile), (de)buff uptime, specific (de)buff's uptime, specific (de)buff's uptime against a focus target, avoidable damage taken, number of instances of avoidable damage taken, vulnerability stacks acquired, deaths, raid time spent rezzing you, healer % uptime spent healing your avoidable damage taken, total mitigation, average percent mitigation, average %HP decrease per strike taken, average %HP decrease per strike taken above a set threshold, damage percentiles by source, incoming damage by source, effective healing done, overhealing done, average overhealing percentile, average overhealing cast as portion of total healing casts, damage dealt to specific targets, overkill percentage, and the like are all displayable in real-time through parsers.

Ah, no, I'm not falling under any misconceptions. I specifically denoted how I usually see others focusing on dps.

I see what you mean though; yes, technically, a parser can track a ton of variables. The problem I'm trying to flag stays the same though; it requires someone to go through that volume of information and parse it out into a usable context, which again, frequently devolves into human perspective. Over-selling the "data purity" of a parser doesn't remove humans from the equation, ultimately.

Either way, I see that the discussion is still moot though...

My statements at the start of this entire still hold true to me:
- I can see how a personal score or gauge could be fun
- I personally feel group or public formal parsers are a step in the wrong direction
- So ultimately, the current implementation seems fine as it is and Dev resources could likely be better spent elsewhere

[Shurrikhan]

My statements at the start of this entire still hold true to me:
- I can see how a personal score or gauge could be fun
- I personally feel group or public formal parsers are a step in the wrong direction
- So ultimately, the current implementation seems [to me] fine as it is and Dev resources could likely be better spent elsewhere

And (bold added) that's fair. Personally, I feel that the private/personal score is the essential portion, as my main interest is in making a powerful learning tool less exclusive.

Benefits of extending parsers to the group or public level are altogether separate: they mark a change to social dynamics, give opportunities for friendly competition, can socially center learning when people are willing to help, shop-talk, and provide more immediate redress or pertinent discussion when hitting a wall in content.

However, yes, they may also put points of conflict into view; it is up to you whether you wish to blame the glasses for how ugly your view now unarguably is, but personally I can hardly fault parsers for their added clarity, so long as due standards are met to keep the information contextualized (giving a more picture more indicative or gestalt than that provided by raw damage numbers alone).

I'd be happy even just giving a personal parser to PS players, though I do also think stopping there would be a tremendous waste, as it'd deny context and maintain certain paradigms I, personally, feel are far more toxic than what public information would effect. I would rather dispense with the blame games and move on to informed correction directly, if it's even seemingly necessary.

Perhaps you could say that I am naïve in my thinking that we're not typically so belligerent as to go off on each other the moment our blindfolds are removed. I'd offer instead, though, that we already have sufficient excuses, glimpsed from within that limited vision, but merely lack clarity; worse, lacking that clarity, we often want to fill the unknown with what guesswork, however poor or outright feigned, we can utilize, and often in a way more fixated on one's self than typically seen with well-contextualized public information.

Put another way, in the absence of information as public, plain, and incidental, questions of fault often dissolve into a me-or-them sort of false dichotomy. It too often turns to "Is it my fault?" and consequently "It's (one of) them! They're the problem!" as if "they" were somehow collective and/or interchangeable. When you are one among many, even if you happen to have performed the worse, granular "fault" or room for improvement still shows among all others and, assuming you are not so badly underperforming as to show the content an ill fit for you at present, the task thus appears more collective.